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The authors Robert Calfee and Melanie Sperling begin to distinguish the methods they are mixing, making reference to those Russian thinkers Vygotsky and Bakhtin, as well as other familiar names in this research field, like Scribner and Cole. Their own projects get a couple pages' worth of description too, but Calfee and Sperling's prose is a little too dense to determine what and why their methods got mixed together.

Things start to get messy in a familiar tragic way as outspoken citizens are punished in Tiberius' court. Lots of shout-outs to familiar plays like Julius Caesar and perhaps Coriolanus. Lepidus emerges as a voice of reason, overlooked as his ancestor in Antony and Cleopatra. A fine pedigree of Roman plays Jonson brings to mind, the most pertinent in this act being Titus Andronicus.

The final days of Robert Ross' wars have one traumatic event piled on top of another, it is a surprise that more ranking officers were not shot in the face: his harrowing rape in the bathhouse, by fellow Canadians, and the corralling of animals leading to their fiery deaths, also by the allied British. At least there is some sense of who the archivist is in the epilogue, just like the end of Thor 2.

Off to a good start with mentions of social media in language and literacy education, straight out of the gate as it were, as each breed of research runs neck and neck for most of the chapter. Qualitative seems to be the favoured ringer, but quantitative method may be the odds-on underdog in this race. Of course, this guidebook should be about effective ways to combine (or crossbreed if still in racing mode) methods.

Taking a much needed break from the mud and carnage in France, Juliet chronicles the recreated France in the English countryside, the d'Orsey estate. A very literary world filled with candle-lighting ghosts, pacifist (such as Virginia Woolf) mingling with soldiers and something like the something nasty in the woodshed still tormenting the gin and cigarette-soaked Lady Juliet. All to say her sister and Robert had sex.

Wonder why so many characters condemn Roman spies, since everyone seems to know the plots laid by everyone else. Hardly the master of subtly, Sejanus seems intent on eliminating everyone who stands in the way, which is pretty much every character introduced in Act I, and the some. Tiberius must have something up his purple sleeve, yet I am not surprised if at least a dozen or so Roman know of it before Sejanus falls.

The clay trenches seem like a bad idea from the start: already mined by the Germans, in a low position and just ready to collapse on trapped soldiers. Nevertheless Robert and a scant few survive, partly due to clear thinking in crisis, partly due to the elements of frozen clay and snow. Strange encounter with the German sniper, yet at this point in the war anything mad was possible such as the hoses that spewed fire.

A messy and naughtier world than one would see at most present-day Renaissance fairs, this play starts off with malicious gossip, bodily functions and hints of infidelity, all gathered from classical sources. Strange that many factions on-stage, all plotting within earshot of each other, so I wonder if there is some dramatic tension to follow. One memorable line: "Ambition makes more trusty slaves than need" (p. 50).

After all the temporal and locational jumping around of the first section, it is a relief that the narrative takes a more conventional path in the second, with Robert marching throughout the damp lowlands en route to Ypres "the centre of the world" (p. 69). Yet even with a steady lock on when, a sense of where is displaced once he gets to the trenches and flashes back to England while "you" jump ahead to meet Juliet.

Not sure what it is about Jonson that I don't much care for, but it becomes apparent in the introduction to this play (the first thing of his longer than a masque I have ever read) that he strives to have his plays both ways: artistic renditions of actual history that also tragically point out the faults of present-day tyranny. It also seems that he went out of his way to please and slyly critique the educated elite.

So much for all that "band of brothers" and "ne'er so vile" parts of the inspirational St. Crispian speech when a Welsh captain can pistol-whip a soldier while the English captain looks on. That the leek-eating Pistol lives on while happily wedded Henry and Kate end up losing most of France and making England bleed for almost a century seems to be as close to poetic justice as Shakespeare can hint at without penalty.

The truest test of this play's sensibility towards what's fair in war comes with how stage productions handle the exchange of words (and gloves) between Michael Williams and the king. In some cases, the outspoken soldier is brought to shame, but the "happy few" directors take Williams dissent as real gold, and his refusal of reward is directed at Henry, not just meddling Fluellen. Harry's conscious should be touched.

Henry goes from hot to cold in this Act, from the siege of Harfleur to the dispatching of Bardolph, another off-stage death for the Eastcheap team. Thy Boy may be in the right for wanting to leave these ruffians, but it somehow seems dramatically wrong. Like Jamy and Macmorris who are conscripted into England's battle, Pistol should have his due, but instead gets on the bad side of Fluellen thanks to glowering Gower.

Two telling signs that this play may have been rushed for the Globe's opening are in Act Two. First, Falstaff dies off-stage when he was supposed to appear as foretold in Henry IV Part 2. Second is the glossing of Cambridge's role, as he had more right to England's throne than Harry did (being the grandfather of Edward IV and Richard III) according to the same "female line" that got England to invade France.

If there was ever proof that the Globe Theatre was a Renaissance virtual world, it is the opening chorus to Henry V, calling upon the audience to use imagination to co-create the story. No sooner is this figured world conjured, but audiences are treated to a lengthy sermon: listing ancestor's rights in France, then getting all fire and brimstone to urge England's Henry to invade. And for their sport: tennis!

The wonderful reign of Henry V gets problematized in this edition (up to the point of publication) where a likeable character gets away with invading another country, accusing the French for defending their own and paving the way for the imperialism that can be traced back to Queen Elizabeth's reign and more specifically the era that the play was created. Still the editor Humphreys explains its continuous popularity.

Here are topical references to being a student in the suburbs back in the day, the seemingly straight-forward homophobic late 1990's where politicians and pasta executives (like today: shame on you Russia, Uganda and Barilla!) did not have to prove why the LGBT community should be excluded or publicly shamed: they just were excluded, tormented and causally killed off. Rishma's research just may have turned the tides.

Exactly how my mind has been adapting to postgraduate studies: a bit all over the place, but heading in an interesting direction. Evelyn narrates the several paths that led her to buying a dilapidated house at an extreme end of the Lower Mainland as she attempts to find her place in chain of utterances that are words on the page. Some of the poetry must be hers, whoever she is meant to represent in Rishma's own world

"Of horses and dogs" would be a more fitting title for Robert Ross' seemingly brief stint in the Great War (singular), as they are the creatures most attended to in the novel so far: the opening image on the train tracks to the letters sent home to the family dog, Bimbo. Humans so far just seem to exist as frozen photographs of long ago, whether they are the coldly indifferent Ross family or the soldiers in training.

Four hundred and twenty characters to describe the play are hardly enough (with a hundred gone now), and the greater parts this time around are the spaces where action happens off-stage: six or seven main characters' deaths are reported, not staged; a brewing war between Cornwall and Albany that never happens; and all the naughty talk about nothing and bastardy, yet each of the females (and only three) are childless.

Far from being a singular vision of what the great tragedy is, this introductions dwells on the many uttered nothings written into the play, and then subtracts the omissions in 18th and 19th century editions, followed by a division of what remains into two versions: First Quarto and Folio. To say King Lear is one thing seems to miss the point, and the best summary of all its chaos is Kurosawa's Ran.

For the first of its kind in Canadian academia, this semi-fictional dissertation has set the bar for arts-based research, and yet makes it seem so straightforward and simple that It is odd how very few researchers did the same. When I can get my dream-team advisory committee together, I want to write science fiction as a scholarly dissertation: the eternally emerging field of digital literacy is ripe for time travel.

So much has changed with regard to this play's reception in the past fifteen year. No longer a weak comedy but crammed with as many farcical scenes as any in London might play. The watery punishment, the sawn-down greenworld, the gossiping mistresses (Quickly placed prominently among her middle class peers) and hints that Falstaff might have been played by Richard Burbage, not the Kempe character as seen in Henry IV.

The well-considered introduction presents two sides to the play: one that audiences worldwide have enjoyed for centuries and another that has confounded critics and Falstaffian purists as an anomaly. The city comedy format, similar to what would later appear as Knight of the Burning Pestle or comedy of humours, as in Every Man and his..., show Shakespeare as a enterprising and innovative playwright.

Just when I was ready to write off the whole guidebook as required reading (in a pejorative sense), the authors whip up a short concluding chapter on laminating many layers of research. It may seem obvious to those long in the academic publishing biz, but having it spelled out so succinctly is a small gift in itself. Of course, they wrap it up with my favourite research word, narrative, and new favourite, chronotope.

Leontes and Paulina are both changed after sixteen years of repentance, yet she still knows how to press his buttons over an old grief. The Shepherd and his son join the ranks of nameless gentlemen populating the renewed court, while Autolycus stands apart as drawn to his old thieving ways. At last, the family reunites due to Paulina's witchcraft: too many hints that a reanimated Hermione was once as dead as her son.

How many words, shapes and strange punctuation marks are piled on top of a video of classroom interaction, and at least four different understandings? All of it together goes to show how complex learning is, yet nothing to be done with this data except to be confused? Even the awesomely named Douglas Macbeth does not add anything dramatic to the discourse. Sociocultural at least gets some sense of students' meanings.

As much as the tone and theme shift as Time overturns the hourglass, the most fascinating change Shakespeare brings into this improbable tale once known as Greene's Pandosto is the criminal Autolycus. Often overlooked as a plot device, a way of getting the humble shepherd and his bumbling son on a ship for Sicilia, the former servant to Prince Florizel acts as a Touchstonian bridge between court and country.

A brief yet action-packed Act, which sets up hope for Hermione's innocence, yet undoes it all by the stubbornness of self-assured tyranny. Both she and Paulina restrain outrage as there could be no worse torture for Leontes than what must have gone through his mind when half of his family dies instantly and the remaining quarter sent away. Antigonus gets his famous exit, and time to change into his Autolycus costume.

One of the fascinating yet frustrating things about the English language is that any noun can be made into a verb: someone friended another on Facebook, texting and trolling on-line and I am sure it won't be long before "she becauses" becomes accepted thanks to Internet. This book only mentions but does not pursue cyberspace discourse, sticking more to Gee's big and little d discourse, as well as bird reading levels.